Archive for 2023
November 28, 2023
YES:
In certain respects societies and cultures resemble neural networks, which produce outputs from inputs through a process of weights. They learn from data to adjust the weights.
Sucessful societies learn to do it globally right, but dysfunctional ones are systematically wrong.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) November 28, 2023
CHANGE: Volkswagen says its core VW brand is ‘no longer competitive’ financially.
“With many of our pre-existing structures, processes and high costs, we are no longer competitive as the Volkswagen brand,” Thomas Schaefer told staff during a meeting at the German carmaker’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, according to a post on the company’s intranet site seen by Reuters.’
The company has been working to improve the financial performance its globally popular namesake car brand, a company spokesperson said. The process is especially important as the VW Group, the parent company, shifts to production of more electric cars.
I hate to break this to you, Mr. Schaefer, but going all-in on EVs is not going to make Volkswagen more competitive.
On the plus side, my best friend recently bought VW’s all-new Golf R — his second — and it’s well made, comfortable, has all the gizmos, and is a kick in the pants to drive. It’s also reasonably priced — if you can get one at sticker price, which has become impossible.
Maybe VW could build a few more gas-burners that people will pay a big markup for.
EASIER SAID THAN DONE — BUT IT MUST BE DONE: Professor Calls for Reform of ‘Failing’ Woke Education System.
BLUE ON BLUE: Kamala Harris v. Gavin Newsom: The Coming Democratic Civil War.
When Biden named Harris his running mate, he conferred on her heir-apparent status. The pick made sense. VP nominees are mostly about pulling together party divisions or offsetting the nominee’s weaknesses. As an old, white male Catholic, Biden running with a minority female checked some important identity boxes. And, in 2020 with a campaign hobbled due to covid restrictions, Harris did just fine. The “not Trump” campaign worked.
However, given an opportunity to establish herself as the next Democratic hope, Harris has proven rather maladroit. Something about her isn’t quite right. Her speeches are mediocre, with poorly thought-out ad libs. Her awkwardness with voters is positively Hillary Clintonesque. After spending her life in the progressive hothouse of California, Harris has shown little ability to build appeal in the other more centrist 49 states. Given the unpleasant portfolio of illegal immigration early in the administration, she failed to distinguish herself. If she has any real policy responsibility today, it’s not apparent.
But what must rankle Harris the most and speaks to how badly she must be viewed in Democratic power corridors is the utter lack of interest in her replacing Biden on the ticket. Joe Biden’s numbers are bad, very bad. His approval has been under water for the past two years. He is running behind Trump on multiple ballot test polls — despite Trump’s myriad problems. The double-minority woman Harris replacing Biden should be the talk of the town. But it isn’t.
As he almost always does, Biden chose poorly with Harris. In fact, aside from Stacy Abrams, it’s difficult to imagine a worse Veep pick after Biden promised to choose a woman of color.
But if the Democrat-Media Complex manages to pull that hapless pair over the finish line just one more time, President Kamala Harris (shudder) will almost certainly fill out part or even most of Biden’s second term.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Fed up with horrible student discipline, states bring back suspensions, expulsions. But progressives are unhappy.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Want to Know How to Support Israel? This Palestinian Group Has the Shopping List for You! “Apparently, buying anything from Kit Kats to Le Labo perfumes to Vaseline (and wouldn’t that make for a weird weekend) helps ‘Israel killing Muslim children with your money.'”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: 64 US Banks Shut Down in One Week. Did You Notice?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: New Harvard Sustainability Action Plan aims to unite climate justice with DEI.
SAD: Liberals Once Embraced Interracial Marriages Like Mine. What Changed?
There were not a lot of interracial couples in those years, and even fewer from backgrounds as disparate as ours: Sonya, the black woman from inner-city Houston; me, the white guy from an Iowa farm. Like our future children, Barack Obama was the child of vastly different experiences—a Kenyan father and a white mother born in Kansas. I told Sonya that night that our kids will see Barack Obama and grow up with a cultural worldview similar to his own.
We held hands at the promise of it all. America, progressing.
I remember the summer of 2020, too. By then, our daughter, Harper, was 11, and our twin boys, Marshall and Walker, were nine, and we didn’t know what to make of America’s progress.
It had started to harden into something ugly. Progressivism had abandoned its open-mindedness and color blindness and insisted on the unavoidability—the supremacy—of color. According to the new dogma, only black people could understand black people.
The black NYU students who demanded they be housed in segregated dorms. The POC Berkeley students whose off-campus housing barred white people from entering. The Boston University professor and best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” And, closer to home, the white mother in our neighborhood, roughly my age, who approached me at a backyard barbecue and whispered, “I don’t know how you can raise black children right now.”
It was suddenly as though, because of my skin tone, I no longer had the right to parent my own kids.
To be fair, progressives don’t want anybody raising their own children.
Also, Obama’s racial healing BS was a con that set back race relations by decades.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Hamas Lovers Want to Ruin Christmas Now. “This was all happening in very blue places, but how long before this behavior goes nationwide? As I’ve written a few times, the public education indoctrination mill has been quite successful, and those schools are everywhere. If there is anything that we have learned since 2020, it’s that we should probably expect the worst.”
HAPPY GIVING TUESDAY: Please consider donating to InstaPundit, and/or a paid subscription to my Substack. Thanks!
PRE-DISCREDITING THE 2024 ELECTION RESULTS IN CASE THEY LOSE: Conservative judges have come for what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.
HEY, JUST BECAUSE CONSUMERS DON’T WANT TO PAY FOR THEIR WORK: Top journalism school pushes taxpayer funding of reporters and media outlets.
Our government and media are in bed already. Let’s not make it worse.
DON SURBER: Democrats are splitting up: Bad policies on inflation, immigration and Israel catch up with the party.
Enjoy the chaos, but don’t get cocky. Plus:
The New York Times said, “Never before was consumer sentiment this consistently depressed when joblessness was so consistently low. And voters rate Mr. Biden badly on economic matters despite rapid growth and a strong job market. Young people are especially glum: A recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College found that 59% of voters under 30 rated the economy as poor.”
By never before, NYT means since Carter was president.
NYT blames TikTok.
#Journalism.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: George Floyd’s death led to a racial reckoning — where’s the antisemitism reckoning?
NAH, IT’S WORSE: Biden’s Foreign Incompetency Is a Jimmy Carter Replay
THE SELECTIVE MEMORY OF THE “NEW MCCARTHYISM” CROWD. I have a new piece up today in The Atlantic and on Substack: “as far as free speech is concerned, 2023 has been a relatively normal year for colleges and universities. Just don’t confuse ‘normal’ with ‘good.'”
MONEY DOES TALK: Wary of Deportation, Elite Colleges Won’t Expel Anti-Semitic Foreign Students. “There are roughly one million foreign-born students enrolled at American colleges and universities. At elite institutions like MIT, nearly a quarter of all students hail from another country. Keeping these students on campus is that one reason college administrators have opted not to punish students making anti-Semitic comments, even as Jewish students say they feel unsafe. The Washington Free Beacon could not find a single incident of a student suspended over a protest, even in cases where police made arrests.”
It’s not only that these particular students pay full freight tuition, it’s that their governments send a steady stream. The Congress needs to do something about this purchase of influence.
BIDENOMICS: The High Price of Gaslighting.
This interpretation of the CPI report is profoundly dishonest. The 3.2 percent inflation rate is nearly three times the 1.2 percent rate that Biden inherited. It is down “65 percent” only because the Biden’s administration let it skyrocket to 9.1 percent before attempting to get it under control. That gas is “below $3.40” hardly compares well to the national average of $2.11 that prevailed when Biden was elected. As to wages, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that average hourly earnings (adjusted for inflation) for all employees stood at $11.05 in October, down from $11.10 in March of 2020, when the lockdown lunacy began. (READ MORE from David Catron: Trump Is Winning Ballot Access Cases)
There are just too many discrepancies between the President’s claims and the voter’s experience with the real world economy. According to the RealClearPolitics average, only 38.1 percent approve of his economic stewardship. Even worse, according to the NYT/Siena poll, swing state voters trust Trump over Biden on the economy by wide margins. Any president running for reelection must convince voters they’re better off than four years earlier. Biden isn’t making the sale. This is not merely politically perilous for him, it is a source of perplexity for the corporate media.
Their confusion stems from not being able to sell “The Guy Who Has Actually Had To Govern” today as well as they were able to sell him as “Not Trump” four years ago.
STUPID CUSTOMERS: Money talks, and Disney doesn’t like what it says.
KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: The Biden Energy Slush Fund: A $400 billion pile of cash dwarfing most private green investment vehicles.
Mr. Shah isn’t a household name—unless your household includes lobbyists, financiers or crony capitalists. Those are the clients of Mr. Shah’s fief, the revived Energy Department Loan Programs Office. Last humiliated a decade ago, it’s part of that crack DOE bureaucracy that bet on such green tech ventures as Abound (the failed solar company), Fisker Automotive (the failed electric-car maker) and A123 (the failed battery maker). “This announcement today” is about “investing in the infrastructure and technology of the future,” crowed Vice President Biden in 2009, unveiling a $535 million DOE loan for a solar outfit he promised would power 500,000 homes and create 1,000 jobs. That outfit was Solyndra.
As if to prove that anything Mr. Biden could botch 10 years ago he can botch bigger and better now, the loan office is back, baby. Americans gasped at the audacity of Barack Obama’s $814 billion stimulus bill in 2009—and of gambling some $80 billion on clean energy—but that’s peanuts. The Biden spending rampage has bestowed on Mr. Shah, director of the loan department, a stunning $400 billion to hand out to green companies too risky for traditional lenders, or too politically powerful to turn down. According to a July Journal story, the “pile of cash is at least 20 times as big as most private green-energy funds.”
With that kind of funny money, Mr. Shah and DOE aren’t restricting themselves to small-time bets. The agency agreed to a $1 billion loan for Monolith, a company that promises to make hydrogen out of natural gas. Sunnova, a solar company, landed a $3 billion loan guarantee. Then there are all the real paupers. General Motors and LG scooped up $2.5 billion to build electric-vehicle battery plants. Ford landed a record $9.2 billion battery commitment. The Ford loan would be $3.3 billion larger than what the company borrowed during the Detroit meltdown of 2008-09.
The Obama-era loan office was tarred by accusations of cronyism; dollars had a way of going to the politically connected. Now Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have sent a letter to Mr. Shah demanding answers about an October report in the Washington Free Beacon. It claimed a private trade association Mr. Shah founded as a “networking hub” in 2017 has “become a gatekeeper for companies seeking billions of dollars in financing from Shah’s office.”
The report explains that the Cleantech Leaders Roundtable didn’t even “have a website until three years ago,” though in the year after Mr. Shah left its revenue “more than tripled.” It says Cleantech “hosts sold-out receptions featuring Shah for its paying members.” In September Cleantech and the loans office “co-hosted an invitation-only conference” in D.C. “for companies looking for loans—and Cleantech Leaders was in charge of the invite list and ticket sales.”
Since 2021, when Mr. Shah was named loan-office head, “companies connected to the trade association have raked in cash from Shah’s office.”
Culture of corruption.
WELL, RUTH MARCUS: WaPo Poster Girl Ruth Marcus Wrote a 500-Page Book on Brett Kavanaugh. It Took One Sentence to Implode. “It’s not just the bias. It’s the incompetence. Too many journalists, even the ‘veterans,’ are simply bad at their jobs. In no other profession can such blunders result not in pink slips but promotions. I recently read Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover by Ruth Marcus, a writer at the Washington Post. The tome is nearly 500 pages. Yet in one sentence Marcus makes it clear that she has no business being a reporter.”
Plus: “The Washington Post, whatever reputation it might once have had, is no more. I trace this to July 2016, when the paper ran a piece by New York University professor Jay Rosen, who argued that Donald Trump made it necessary for journalists to change tactics.”